Exploring the World
of Communication 

      As a result of the weakening of traditional ties in late modernity, people look towards virtual communities as social loci for the re-negotiation and construction of their identities. The ambiguous and complex environment of cyberspace becomes a new arena for the articulation of the politics of recognition, generating hybrid collective formations, such as digital nations, virtual diasporas and other online communities of an ethnic/national orientation. These novel contexts of social interaction emerge from the glocalized flows of electronic mediascapes and challenge our notions of home, belonging, community and identity in various ways. More importantly, they function as manifestations of the desire of communities to exist in public space and confirm their presence in an increasingly complex and mediated social world. This paper offers some preliminary thoughts and observations on the mediation of national, ethnic and cultural self-representation by the Internet and makes an attempt to reveal their contemporary sociological importance.

     One of the most interesting “unintended consequences” of the Internet has been the creation of mediated social networks of sociability and collective belonging, populated by an ever-increasing number of individuals of different national origins and backgrounds. A quick tour of the Internet reveals a diverse ecology of virtual neighborhoods, online communities, cyber-salons, cyber-commons, community networks and digital nations, formations that are novel and in many ways still ambiguous.  Scholars have sought to decipher the complexity of the alternative identities and communities that arise from the glocalized "neo-world."[i]  This paper hopes to contribute to the ongoing discourse, by examining how ethnic groups and diasporic communities use the Internet to create identity and gain visibility and recognition in the public sphere.  

     Questions of identity have attained a remarkable centrality within both the humanities and social sciences lately. In the realm of politics and international relations, for example, the identity of the modern nation-state is called into question in light of the interconnectedness created by globalization.  Under these conditions, various marginalized groups seek recognition in the public sphere through political maneuvers that include discursive as well as action-oriented practices.[ii] At the same time, the emergence of new social movements that defy the classical class or ethnic criteria have brought about new processes of personal and collective identity formation. In general, ever since the 1960s the articulation and negotiation of personal and collective identities have gained prominence in both theory and practice.

     With regard to the politics of identity in cyberspace, many questions come to mind: How are we to understand virtual identities? Does the online world bring something new to the identity formation process?  Do online groups and communities shape the identities of their members? What is the link between virtual communities and the wider post-traditional social universe? These questions intrigue us. Without pretending to be exhaustive, this paper attempts to set up a rough framework for analyzing the formation of collective identity in the computer-mediated context of late modernity.

     We know that we cannot define a virtual identity once and forever, as we cannot define any other type of identity. Since identities do not have an essence, monolithic thinking in an essentialist mode is inadequate for explaining the highly complex and multidimensional process that shapes our identities today.[iii]  Our identity is socially-constructed (in the sense of being created through a process of social interaction) and involves our relationship with both people (in the sense of how we relate socially to others on a day-to-day basis) and things (in the sense of how technological developments, for example, create or deny opportunities for the creation of different types of identity). Thus, the question in focus is not "what exactly is a virtual identity", but rather "what does it mean to invoke a virtual identity"? If we accept that social identity is a social construction, then we are compelled to ask the question "why and how is this specific identity articulated"?

     When we talk about cyberspace we refer to a distanced and disembodied social world, yet one naturalized and appropriated through new processes of inhabiting the non-physical. Cyberspace is thus sociologically important because it provides new terms and conditions for membership and belonging. It does not radically alter the social bases of identity or the conventional constraints on social interaction, although it certainly provides openings for variations based in the new opportunities made available. Therefore the issues that arise can be addressed as questions of emerging structures of interaction and the re-organization of social boundaries that can occur with any new medium of communication.

     Before we move forward, two points should be noted. One, by its very nature, identity is political. Identity creation is a process of negotiation, definition, and social battle. It involves political recognition, law and discourse, inclusion and exclusion. Hence not all groups have the same power on matters regarding identity. For example, minority groups do not often have the power to define themselves. If identity is “irreducible” indeed as Stuart Hall explains, it is so because it is central to all questions that have to do with history and politics (Hall 1996).

     Two, we should not forget that it is somewhat arbitrary to talk of online communities and cyberspace in general as if they were of a single and uniform type. Online communities are very diverse in their composition, their goals and their evolution, and cyberspace is a pluralistic, multi-tasking and distributed environment made up of very different sub-contexts of communication. Therefore if (online) communities and identities are to be understood, their singularity and uniqueness must be taken into account.

Online Phenomena as Emblematic of the Post-Traditional World

     Many theorists have observed that online phenomena are a manifestation of the age of late modernity.[iv] Online communitarianism, virtual ethnicities and digital nations are part of what Poster (1998) calls “the strange new world of the postmodern quotidian” (p. 197). They are symptoms of the paradigmatic shift to the post-traditional order characterized by trends of increasing mobility, pluralism, globalization, individuation and the relentless flow of technologically mediated signs, images, and discourses. Above all, they reflect the paradoxes and antithetical forces of a more or less reflexive modernization, where tendencies to overcome traditional identifications coexist with attempts to anchor oneself in new life-worlds of meaning and identity. In order to understand virtual communities and identities, we have to understand their structural ambiguity and the ambiguity of the larger context they are part of[v].

     It is not surprising that in this age of liquidating boundaries and identities, the politics of identity becomes a major issue and the driving force behind many current trends.[vi]  Identity—individual and collective—gains great significance as individuals and groups seek to find a modus operandi to reconfirm or invent their boundaries and produce meaning in a world where meaning is fluid and contingent, rather than given and stable. The quest for identity is thus seen as an attempt to reverse the entropy and stabilize a presence in a world of rapid, constant, and unpredictable change. The current upsurge in the realm of social movements, nationalism and various localisms, the multiplication of non-governmental organizations, voluntary organizations, and grassroots resistance movements, are all attempts by individuals and groups to regain a degree of control over their destiny in a chaotic world.

     The widespread insecurity of late modernity also accounts for the contemporary articulation of identity politics in terms of “community” – national, ethnic, gender, minority, religious, cultural, and others. From McLuhan to Maffesoli and from Bauman to Castells and Appadurai, many social theorists have repeatedly indicated that this is "the age of community", an age dominated by the need to belong to something that surpasses the very individuality it helps consolidate. Community, despite or thanks to its definitional vagueness, works as symbolic glue, as a “bestower of identity”(Bauman, 1995) that can gather and hold people together. Fundamentally transformed, community in late modernity is “adopted” rather than “handed down,” it is a community of choice and free will, and something we search for rather than inherit. And it is, to a large extent, this voluntary quality of post-traditional communities that allows us to define ourselves and face the trends of abstraction, globalization, homogenization, and atomization. In a very important sense, community also works as a mechanism for gaining visibility in public life,[vii] although at times it is nothing more than pure rhetoric for maximizing power or profit. Appadurai (1996), for example, discusses “diasporic public spheres” which he sees as emblems of the post-national political order and explains how the politics and communities of the diasporas have been fundamentally altered by electronic mediation.

     The enthusiasm that has accompanied online communitarianism is evidence of this trend of community-seeking.  It has been frequently noted that critical to the rhetoric surrounding the Internet since its first days has been the promise of a “renewed sense of community.” The Internet is seen as providing an antidote to at least some of the ills of post-industrial societies.[viii] In other words, there is the expectation that the Internet will function as a "communal heaven," a means for achieving solidarity and congealing threatened identities in an electronic social space. 

     Such motives arise from the tensions of post-modernity and our need to match the space of flows with the power of places.[ix] In the case of computer-mediated-communication, what allows for the reconstruction of community and place is the flexibility and openness of the Internet. It is a pleasant irony that the Internet, a placeless medium, allows for the (re)creation of place. Online communities could be seen as a human experiment in shrinking back the world by creating personalized lifestyles that create a sense of anchoring in an otherwise vast cyberspace.  With their emergent conventions of membership and behavior, with continuous interaction and patterns of togetherness, online communities are indeed life-size, whereas the flows of communication on a global scale tend towards the infinite and are chaotic and obfuscating. Alone at the keyboard, we search for others and transform bits of data into communicative richness.

Mediation of Community and Identity

     In addition to a common goal, most successful experiments in cyber-communitarianism presume some shared history, language, and culture that provide the "raw material" in terms of the symbolic capital for the reproduction of a community in the virtual meta-space. Participants commit their personal selves to new socialization processes of learning and acculturation, adopting and abiding by the rules, norms, cultural codifications, and hierarchies of the groups they join. Through these meaning-making processes online communities become new habitats for social experience and identity.

     Nonetheless, these are not naturalized communities; they have not existed forever or in any essential way. They are perhaps "imagined communities" in extreme. The value of using Benedikt Anderson's structural (and non-geographical or historical) conception of imagined communities for the online type is that it draws attention away from their presumed real-ness or pseudo-ness, to how people construct online spaces by imagining them as communities. Imagined communities are mainly categorical identities where members are largely held together through a "mass ceremony" carried out in "silent privacy." Each member knows that thousands (or millions) of others, whose existence she is certain but whose identity she knows nothing about, are also partaking in this ceremony. As Foster (1997) observes,  "the context of CMC necessarily emphasizes the act of imagination that is required to summon the image of communion with others that are often faceless, transient, or anonymous" (p. 25).

     Anderson (1983) used the term "imagined communities" in reference to nation-states and national ideology. It is time now to wonder how electronic mediation reconfigures the expression of national and ethnic identity online. What happens to ethnic or national self-representation and identity and to the nation-state itself when it goes online?

     One of the main observations by many theorists worldwide regarding the era of late modernity is the disintegration of national consciousness under the weight of globalization. These developments subvert the primacy of the geographically bounded nation-state, and undermine old identifications in terms of which individuals traditionally determined themselves and formed their identities. The paradox is that while we do away with "old ties that bind" we do not cease searching for new ones. Globalization undermines local/particular identities, but local/particular identities re-emerge even more vehemently out of the very conditions of globalization that are responsible for undermining them. Castells (1997) speaks eloquently on the contemporary tension that gives rise to the politics of identity.

Yet identity is becoming the main […] source of meaning in a historical period characterized by widespread destructuring of organizations, deletigimation of institutions, fading away of major social movements, and ephemeral cultural expressions. People increasingly organize their meaning not around what they do but on the basis of what they […] believe they are. Meanwhile, on the other hand, global networks of instrumental exchanges selectively switch on and off individuals, groups, regions, and even countries, according to their relevance in fulfilling the goals processed in the network, in a relentless flow of strategic decision. It follows a fundamental split between abstract, universal instrumentalism, and historically rooted, particularist identities (p. 470).

     Today, media play a paramount role in the processes of identity formation, by diffusing information and offering the symbolic "proto-material"—images, representations, discourses, and interactions—from which identities are made. Historically, print and electronic media have mediated national consciousness—either by reviving or attenuating it—mainly through the use of rhetorical and ideological discourse patterns that hail their audience as members of various communities and nations. Media mediate national consciousness to such a degree that many speak today of the synthetic character of national identity as the product of the intertwining of direct and indirect (mediated) experiences.

     This development has been described as the increasing mediation of the institutional public sphere, whereby public life is “migrating” from the bounded, geographical territorialities of the past to the diffuse and immaterial networks of communication and media flows. Cyberspace in its first manifestation, the Internet, adds another matrix of mediation. By opening up a new communicative space between individuals and groups, the Internet poses anew the issue of national or ethnic identity. It is another archive, mirror and laboratory for the negotiation of national and ethnic identity. To use a popular metaphor, it is yet another frontier to be colonized by our imaginary and national identity.

Construction of Online Ethnicity and Virtual Diasporas

     Although many commentators tend to over emphasize the dissolution of social and national markers on the Internet, national and ethnic identities are present everywhere in the Internet. Part of e-mail and web address is the country suffix (e.g knd@hol.gr or www.childrensworld.uk). In the homepages of many individuals we find symbols – pictures, texts, and images - that point to the creator's identity, either inherited or self-defined. In interactive environments such as MOOs and MUDs, a participant may structure her online persona in terms of ethnic characteristics such as names (e.g. "GreekKaterina" or "Tom.CaliforniaSunshine"). In online dialogue, ethnicities are either consciously projected by individuals or unconsciously “given off” in the process of conversation. These are all online expressions of ethnicity.

     More importantly, the Internet is teeming with electronic pages, discussion groups, and communities of an ethnic, tribal or national character. For example, the Usenet "soc.culture" groups host hundreds of different communities. There are also many online diasporic communities that allow dispersed individuals of a common ethnic or national background to connect with one another on a global level (e.g. www. akaKurdistan for the Kurds or www.chabad.org for the Jews). Mostly created by individuals or groups of individuals, but also by more organized movements or parties, they reproduce a digital version or a “cyber-expansion”[x] of their offline community.[xi]

     We could distinguish between diasporic and non-diasporic ethnicities and nationalities, depending on the communities they represent, the practices they enact and the goals they seek to attain. A schematic description of online ethnicities/nationalities would point to the categories discussed in the following section.[xii]

Non-Diasporic Online Communities

     Nations with a State.  For nation-states the Internet works as an additional medium for reconfirming a more or less stable and coherent identity, defined by belonging to a bounded and recognized national entity. As a rule, websites of this type make extensive and often ideological use of the dominant myths and primary symbols that function as the historical and cultural “glue” of their national identity (flags, anthems, narration of glorious events of the nation’s past, and the like).  Given that these nation-states “enjoy the warmth of a mother/fatherland” it often occurs that “insofar as they use the Internet for exploring and contesting identities – they shoot forth messages of self-assertion, hatred for the national Other or complacency as to the national or/and racial “Us” (Demertzis, 2002, p. 458).        

     Regional Ethnicities within a Nation.   The Internet has been used to fuel a discourse of “liberation” and make an ethnic group’s “justified claims” for independence visible to the global audience.  The creation of a sense of ethnic particularity and historicity, which must be convincing enough to legitimize their struggles and mobilize global public support, is vital for this project.  There are times, however, when the online politics of identity is carried out to extremes, to the point that, as Bakker (2001) points out “it would not be far-fetched to speak of an Internet crusade” carried out by nationalists using the Internet as a “battleground” and web pages as “weapons” (p. 6). This may involve the tactics of so-called cyber-terrorism, as was the case of the Basque Euskal Herria Journal, which was “destroyed” by mail bombs.

     Marginalized or Threatened Identities of Indigenous and Tribal Populations. The Internet has provided indigenous peoples and those living at the margins of nation-states with an opportunity to garner support for alternative cultural practices and thereby cultural autonomy. The advantages the Internet offers for such groups are immense. Low cost for disseminating their ideas and connecting to each other, a global audience, a medium to teach their language and history, a permanent archive of collective memory and above all, the freedom that comes from uncensored speech. Ross Himona, who with the objective of developing “an authentic Maori presence on the Internet” created the Maori Internet Society, expresses this enthusiasm.  "We realized the enormous potential of the medium for Maori to present our stories and our perspective to the world. From the moment we published our websites we were both inundated with visitors from all over the globe, wanting to know more about Maori and Maori culture. The medium is available to all, affordable, and is a global medium" (online)

     In these virtual communities the principal orientation is the affirmation of cultural distinctiveness, plus the promulgation of various “culture-saving” initiatives that need to be undertaken by the national governments.  Thus cultural discourses in these web-spaces are usually woven around a set of themes that emphasize cultural uniqueness, wholeness, coherence, and rootedness. Generally speaking, these sites tend to be very comprehensive and educative and usually provide retrievable archives containing extensive information on all aspects of their culture.

     Apart from issues that touch upon their offline lives, these virtual ethnicities often fight virtual struggles, such as the fight to gain their own Internet Domain Name for their virtual nation (for example, ct. for Catalans or mr. For Maori). The Internet gives voice to these "small narratives" that had been kept in silence and thereby facilitates the emergence of new communities,[xiii] an attempt that may eventually get undermined by conditions of homogenization and globalization, where alternative and small ways of life can hardly survive. Nonetheless, as shown by perhaps the most exemplary case of identity politics, the feminist movement, collective reformulation of shared individual life-stories can unleash emancipatory energies.

     Accordingly, the Internet has played a decisive role in strengthening cultural elements of marginalized ethnic identity through confrontational and consensual processes, as is the case of the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Indian tribes of the US, and other indigenous groups (Woods, 1996). Here the Internet is used by ethnicities for developing strategic alliances with grassroots activists, thereby allowing them an opportunity to apply global pressure on their governments. Gary Trujillo, who manages the "Native-L listserv" and the "NativeNet" homepage, says that the importance of new technologies for indigenous and tribal people "resides mainly in their capacity to enable group planning processes and mobilization of political support" (Woods, 1996).

     In the same spirit, the Inuits of Northern Canada have placed on Internet their hopes for redefining their time-honored ethnic identity and developing economic independence. A Canadian adage says “the Inuit have come from the Stone Age to the Space Age in one generation. In cyberspace, the Inuits have found a potent tool for building new cultural bonds and for telling the south what the north is all about"[xiv]. Similarly, Becker and Delgado (1998) write about the use of the Internet by the indigenous peoples of Latin America:

People who did not formally belong to an indigenous group rediscovered their ethnic heritage and others claiming Indian heritage began populating the news-groups and mailing lists. Many people used the Internet to raise questions concerning their personal and collective identities and to share their histories. Before the Internet, these histories were only accessible through restricted classified systems at university or public libraries. In other words, the information came home and in exchange, people started to share their own oral histories regarding their indigenous experiences  (online)    

Online Diasporic Communities

     Nations or National Groups without a State. This category includes the original diasporic populations to which the term diaspora has traditionally been applied[xv], exemplified by the Jews, the Kurds, the Assyrians, the Palestinians, and the Tibetans. Uprootedness, dislocation and suffering, pain and remembrance are the main discourses among these digital nations.  The focal discourse is the “lost home” and the “right to return home”. Such is the case of the Palestinian diaspora websites, which make the “right to return home” their central rhetoric. Here the supreme symbol of ethnic identity as it is articulated online is reference to their “land”, a reference that clearly invigorates Palestinians’ collective memory of exile. Hala Nassar (2002) of the Virtual Diaspora Project also reminds us: “…what also constitutes the output of diasporic communities is the ability to document a past life in the lost homeland” – “the denied past of the Palestinians” (online).

     Kurdistan, a virtual nation in a very real sense, is another interesting case. The Kurds although possessing a strong national identity do not have a country of their own. They are currently living scattered in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Russia and other countries. The Kurdish site “akaKurdistan” thus describes itself: “This site, a borderless space, provides the opportunity to build a collective memory with a people who have no national archive. Images and recollections serve as testimony to the long and suppressed history of the Kurds” (online).  Clearly, for stateless nations the politics of identity has found in cyberspace an ideal medium for publicity and even mobilization.

     In late modern conditions of predominantly “personalized diasporas” (Mitra, 1997) the Internet becomes thus a medium for reproducing not only the "lost home" but also the "lost community of fellow-immigrants" through common traditions, problems, and needs. The imaginative and discursive online reproduction of those traditions that hold ethnicities together are reflected in Andrew Tannenbaum’s words about Jewish online community experiments.

 For those of us already living in Jewish communities, the Internet binds us together. We can get information, we chat on mailing lists, and we can share our ideas and personalities on web sites. But for Jews isolated in remote locations, the web can really open up the Jewish world for them. And as time goes by, the web will bring us more and more to learn about our people, Jewish history and culture, and torah and mitzvoth (online).

Chabad.org, one of the largest Jewish community sites, serving close to one million people a year and described by the Jewish Week as “the first and the largest virtual congretation” defines its mission to be  to “utilize internet technology to unite Jews worldwide, empower them with knowledge or their 3,300 year-old tradition, and foster within them a deeper connection to Judaism’s rituals and faiths” (online). The same feelings are testified by a visitor to the site whose words feature in one of its pages: “Every day I check my e-mail on this little tiny island of Curaçao in the Caribbean where there is hardly any Jewish life. Every day your e-mail inspires me and gives me a fresh thought for the day. It helps me relate to other people, to myself and to my commitment towards Judaism. You are my link to the outside world and, as far away as I am, I feel connected to my Jewish roots” (online).

     Expatriate/Immigrant Communities of Existing Nation-States.  In conditions of increasing global mobility and immigration, expatriate communities around the world seek all possible ways of resolving the dilemmas of immigration and handling the innumerable problems afflicting their everyday lives. The main purpose of diasporic websites is to build on the Internet a home away from home. Examples include the Greek and Iranian expatriates, the overseas Chinese, Indians living abroad, as well as many Creole and crossover communities such as African-Americans or European-Americans. These digital diasporas may have no clear-cut political causes and no claims other than to maintain links between members scattered all around the globe and promote their general well-being. The orientation of these digital environments is thus more communitarian and communal than political or strategic.

     One example is the Greek Hellenic diaspora website.  Although the Greek Hellenic diaspora has a “real” offline organization, it owes more to the Internet. The homepage text authors acknowledge this when they write:  “The ‘Virtual Organization’ is the strength of Diaspora. Diaspora is unique in its organization: Its members and contributors are scattered in distant locations throughout the globe; the Eastern and Western USA, Canada, Europe and Japan, much like the Diaspora audience. The Internet has been the means through which our members have met and become a team” (online). Although this initiative does not have a straightforward political mission, it is nevertheless politically and socially aware and often takes up initiatives, such as online action-alerts, for raising consciousness among its dispersed members.

     Similarly, the Chinese expatriates’ Huaren.Org, one of the major diasporic communities of the Internet, has helped create a global identity for Chinese people around the globe. Although the main objective of Huaren.org and its virtual extension is to function as a community of togetherness and commonality (to “bridge Chinese individuals to promote the sharing of thoughts and concerns”), it is also actively engaged in the politics of identity (online).  According to the founders, a primary focus of their digital community is on the welfare of overseas Chinese: their struggles to gain recognition, to receive fair treatments, to overcome harmful stereotypes, and to experience self-respect and self-worth.

     Communities of Dissidents who have Fled Totalitarian Regimes. The exiles communities, whether online or offline, seek to de-legitimize or otherwise undermine the regimes in their homeland. Their discourse is that of   “resistance” and “democracy.”  The communications technologies allow them to circumvent state control over public forums. For example, “although people inside Burma cannot use the Internet, Burmese in exile have been quick to take advantage of e-mail and the Internet, both to distribute information in a timely fashion and to organize resistance activities” (Fink, 1998, online).  For exile communities, in many ways, the electronic medium becomes a bridge between their country of origin, existing or desired, and their country of settlement.  Even activities on the website become a shared communal experience.   In fact its very existence works symbolically to reinforce their sense of belonging to a distinct community. 

     In what sense, then, is virtual ethnicity different and novel? What are its defining characteristics? How can virtual ethnicities exist in a world of personalized media and communication? To provide some pointers to these questions one has to consider the unique "grammar" of the Internet as a medium.

     In trying to conceptualize virtual neo-ethnicity, Poster (1998) acknowledges that the new "cyber-virtual language" transforms the constitution of identities online. Poster lists the following features of the Internet: it is a many-to-many medium, a space-time relativized medium of global exchange, of simultaneity without physical co-presence, an anonymous, fluid, eternally reproducible medium, amenable to individual configuration and altogether different technologies of symbolization and identity projection. The existence of this new cyber-virtual grammar that leads Poster to claim: “…virtuality represents an occasion for the articulation of new figures of virtual ethnicity, nationhood, community and global interaction” (p. 194).

     Indeed, one of the defining features of Internet’s structural ambiguity is that it is place dissolving and place generating at the same time. The Internet has no physical territory as time and space virtually shrink on the computer screen; it is de-territorialized and de-territorializing. The time-space compression that began with the disconnection of transport from communication seems to have reached a peak in the digital universe of cyberspace, a borderless universe of communication in which one may participate, independent of one’s national or social origin, religion, age, color or gender. Yet, at the same time, by providing a textual space that is flexible enough to allow for multifarious constructions of identity, computer-mediated communication enacts the creation of place anew.

     Digital nations and virtual ethnicities are novel mediated localities; non-geographical yet communicatively integrated social spaces, which give meaning to their inhabitants. Consciously constructed by individuals to function as convergence zones, meeting-points of dialogic encounter, and above all identity-spaces of remembrance, these virtual communities have a potential life-enhancing quality for those who participate in them. Whether they consist of expatriates who left a distinct country, as in the case of Iran, China or Armenia, or belong to a stateless ethnic group such as the Kurds or the Assyrians, or are an exiled people, like the Tibetans, diasporas have found a way through the Internet to build an online home away from home. Writing about the Internet and the Welsh national identity Mackay and Powell (1997) assert that "… a global technology can contribute to a strengthening of cultural distinctiveness, and despite the placeless of the Internet, it can serve to reinforce place" (p. 215).

     What is interesting about these new modes of articulating identity is the possibility of enacting a digitally constructed, de-localized and most importantly decentralized social public space that knows no distance. By collapsing conventional distinctions between homeland and hostland, nationality and transnationality, personalization and commonality, these formations are flexible enough to serve the needs of nomadic, multifaceted, and problematized identities. In this sense, they are provocative manifestations of postmodern “glocalized,” the dual process of global diffusion and local re-embedding, phenomena in Robertson’s understanding of glocalization as the “global creation of the local” (Robertson, 1995).  Virtual ethnicities are essentially glocalized in that they emanate from the local, involve the local and speak for the local, yet take place on a global scale and can come into existence only through the global medium par excellence, the Internet.

     The Internet challenges national singularity in another interesting manner: by bringing one in contact with others that are different.  Over the Internet one is daily confronted with people who are not of one's kin, tribe, ethnicity, race or community.  This is not to mean that the Internet is culture-free or culture-transcending; nevertheless, it is a special and dynamic precinct of the already cosmopolitan (Beck, 2000). It magnifies that cosmopolitanism, provides it with new sinews and enhances its realities. However, Internet's ambiguous nature once more points to the opposite direction. In fact, the same features that seem to undermine national identity also work to serve, reproduce or even strengthen it. The global scope, relatively low cost and decentralized openness of the medium allows national identity to use a new, powerful communication space to reconfirm itself, resist homogenizing trends and rework its content under new conditions. The digital nations described above may thus be seen as an attempt to save the nation whose boundaries have been punctured and whose legitimacy has long been under crisis. Online ethnicities have this instrumental value of easing the tension between globalization megatrends and local conditions by allowing dispersed or threatened identities to solidify their presence in the global flows of information.

     At this point it should be noted that not only the populations themselves but also many states have used the Internet to create or enhance diasporic communities.  This amounts to strategies undertaken by central states and governments for creating a “diasporic consciousness” where it has not existed before and/or reinforce it. Smith (2002) calls this as “diasporic policy” on the part of the states themselves.  For example, Mexico has purposefully tried to “create” a Mexican diaspora of Mexicans living in the USA to “create another layer or form of membership and belonging” to the state beyond the state (online).

     However, while cyberspace is a place where national or ethnic identity can be manipulated anew, it ends up not being totally different from its non-virtual manifestation. In most cases these digital corners of national/ethnic orientation function as spaces for the re-articulation of the same "social dialogues" that usually preexisted in the offline worlds and around which issues of national determination were produced and reproduced. The Internet becomes a new stage where old issues and conflicts, polarizations and discourses, claims and fantasies of the preexisting identity are played out anew. In the digital world, the memorable and historical past is blended with the challenging and contradicting present that individuals are faced with. To use Poster’s taxonomy virtual ethnicity is "overdetermined" by preexisting cultural forms, memories and conditions, but at the same time "underdetermined", remaining open for construction and an “invitation to the imaginary” (Poster 1998, p. 202).

     Online ethnicities, thus, contain both residual elements of the ethnicity as it has existed through time, and emergent elements, specific to the new communication conditions.[xvi]  For instance, when users search for compatriots through the various newsgroups they actually reproduce prior affiliations but also search for new ones, as they try to find similar people in the infinite yet subdivided universe of digital communication. Thus the online does not erase the offline, as feared by many, but changes its meaning, its modus operandi as well as its sociological implications.

     One of the problems in virtual ethnicity is that it lacks some of the structuring and interactive thickness of traditional ethnicity. It lacks these "micro-practices" that are the "factories of ethnicity" (Poster, 1998, p. 205), exchanged in the intimacy of verbal and non-verbal face-to-face interaction. However, we should not be lead to believe that ethnicity cannot exist without co-presence.[xvii] The Jewish diasporic community, which for years maintained a strong ethnic identity without having a fixed, territorial place, is a case in point. Reminding us of the role of imagination in the construction of community, Poster (1998) points out that memory and remembrance can fill the gap created by the absence of a specific place. Explaining how the dispersed Jewish community was maintained over time, Carey (1989) offers an insightful remark:

The greatest invention of the ancient Hebrews was the idea of the sabbath, though I am using this word in a fully secular sense: the invention of a region free from control of the state and commerce where another dimension of life could be experienced and where altered forms of social relationship could occur. As such the Sabbath has always been a major resistance to state and market power (p. 227).

     The Sabbath allowed the Jewish diaspora to overcome the obstacle of geographical distance by generating a temporal construction of their community by coming together on a weekly basis via ritual.  By means of ritualised practice, the Jewish community was able to produce a lifeworld[xviii] of meaning and identity, a more or less conscious sphere of social integration achieved through practices of cultural reproduction, and more importantly, one functioning autonomously from the institutionalised, systemic fields of the state and the market.

     In the context of the existing literature of cyber-communities, Mallapragada (2000) uses the concept of “imagined community” to explain the Indian diaspora in the US and its reproduction on the Internet. She explains how the Internet allows the constant imaginary construction of identity in direct and everyday practices such as reading newspapers from home, discussing issues of common concern, issues that have to do with the status of being an immigrant, by sharing cultural codes, meeting people, even arranging dates and marriages, all online.  According to her, "cyber-communities reframe the experience of immigration of Indian immigrants, reframe their relations with home and with the rest of the diaspora around the globe" (p.184). 

     Another particularity of the depiction of identity online is that it is too malleable to be durable and consistent. Constructed by the input and discourses of its members-users, any digital nation is subject to the ephemerality that stems from the a-temporal nature of cyber-discourse. How durable and coherent can the digital image of a nation be in the ever-changing nature of cyberspace? The digital image of a national, ethnic or for that matter any identity, is in a way doomed to be a "metamorphosising image […] since every single posting changes the image to some degree and this change is a continuing process since the postings never stop" (Mitra, 1997, p. 75). It may feel palpable, but is always fleeting and evanescent, permanently open to reproduction and change in the light of the mobile nature of cyber-discourse.

The Potentialities of Virtual Communities

     The novel social formations that we have called virtual ethnicities provide a potent counter-argument against the thesis that the lack of territoriality of the Internet leads inevitably to the loss of identity.  On the contrary, the Internet is opening up new arenas for identity discourse. 

     This can be best understood if we think of the construction of virtual ethnicity as involving crossing of multiple borders: the local and the global, home and host, materiality and imaginary. It is also a boundary-crossing process entailing delineation of new boundaries of belonging and imagination of new post-national topographies. Apart from the “discovery” of previously latent identities as in the case of the indigenous populations discussed above, one can observe examples of the “invention” of new identities online, like the “Arctic Circle people.”[xix] The “Arctic Circle identity” denotes the surpassing of national geography since Arctic people may belong to different nations, such as Finland, Russia, Greenland, or Canada.  Furthermore, it marks the delineation of a new territoriality, a meta- or post-territoriality, thought of and structured on the basis of commonalities beyond those of ethnicity and nationhood.  These commonalities are geographic and cultural but of a post-national sort.  

     In any case, the Internet like any other frontier of human experience reconfigures the way we form and project our identities. It may help us reconfirm our identities, but it also might lead us to think reflectively and dispute their very foundations.  Others look beyond a simple transformation of identity politics and hope that the Internet will catalyze a global spiritual renewal whereby people transcend their particular identities in favor for something collective and more inclusive. For instance, French philosopher Pierre Levy envisioned cyberspace as a new "collective intelligence," far better and more promising than any known historical or even conceivable ethnicity. 

If we were to take the route of the collective intelligence, we would gradually invent techniques, systems of signs, social forms of organization and of regulation permitting us to think together, to concentrate our intellectual and mental power, to multiply our imagination and our experiences, to work out solutions for the complex problems affronting us in real time and on all levels (Levy 1996, online).

     How possible is it that our socialization in cyberspace will lead us one step closer to the ideal of "relationality" that Gergen (1995) talked about[xx] or to Gitlin's (1993) "commonality politics, oriented through understanding differences against the background of what is not different, of what is shared among groups" (p.176). Can it draw us away from instrumental action, oriented towards attaining certain goals, to communicative action, oriented towards the reflexive understanding? Can it teach us the art of living together?

     This project is a very ambitious one. If it is to be achieved one thing is certain; efforts cannot be invested solely on the Internet.  While the Internet gives us the tools to do this, it does not solve the underlying problems that have historically made organizing difficult: different concerns, inter-group rivalries and competition for scarce resources, mistrust, intolerance, and prejudice. For this ambitious plan to be implemented, a deeper level of organization is required. To start, a truly multicultural community needs to be fostered to facilitate and safeguard the cross-fertilization of different cultures. Primarily, it entails the creation of a public space in which different communities are able to interact meaningfully and create a new ethics of ecumenical understanding and co-existence despite all their differences.

     How dim or strong chances for this scenario are, only time can tell.

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Websites mentioned:

AkaKurdistan: http://www.akadurdistan.com

Al-awda.org. The Palestine right to return coalition: http://www.al-awda.org/

Arctic Circle WWW Project:  http://www.arcticcircle.uconn.edu

Euskal Herria Journal: http://www.contrast.org/mirrors/ehj/

Chabad-Lubavitch: http://www.chabad.org

Free Burma Coalition: http://www.freeburmacoalition.org

Greek Hellenic Diaspora: http://www.diaspora-net.org

Huaren: http://www.huaren.org

Maori Internet Society: http://www.nzmis.org.nz

Native-L listserv: http://listserv.tamu.edu/archives/native-l.html

NativeNet: http://www.nativenet.uthscsa.edu

Palestinian Diaspora and Refugee Centre: http://www.shaml.org/

Virtual Diaspora Project. The Nautilus Institute: http://www.nautilus.org/virtual-diasporas

Copyright © 2002 Global Media Journal.  All rights reserved. Revised: 01/18/06.